Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday April 30, 2011 @01:24AM
from the brass-tacks-and-billable-hours dept.

itwbennett writes "Google and Oracle each submitted proposals on Friday to reduce the number of claims in their Java patent infringement lawsuit, which could help bring the case to a speedier conclusion. Earlier this month, lawyers for the two companies gave Judge William Alsup of the US District Court in San Francisco a crash course in Java to prepare him for a claim construction conference."

Because giant corporation just love to throw away cash ? If Oracle wins and Google has to pay license fees for their Android implementation of Java Oracle will not only have protected its lucrative Java business from similar shenanigans in the future but it will go home with a pile of cash much bigger than what they are paying their law department. You may not like it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't pay.

Lots of companies are deploying Java where they previously deployed COBOL, so COBOL programmers are definitely not impartial. In contrast, about the only thing that looks like it might stand a chance of displacing Fortran 77 is Fortran 90 - and that's by no means certain.

Obviously it's a crash course in Java from a legal perspective, which is totally different than from a programming perspective. Which programmer cares whether there's established legal precedents to determine whether the JVM creates additional 'copies' of infringing software from a damages perspective?

Lawyers for Oracle and Google gave Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco an overview of Java and why it was invented, and an explanation of terms such as bytecode, compiler, class library and machine-readable code. The tutorial was to prepare him for a claim construction conference in two weeks, where he'll have to sort out disputes between the two sides about how language in Oracle's Java patents should be interpreted. At one point an attorney for Google, Scott Weingaertner, described how a typical computer is made up of applications, an OS and the hardware underneath. 'I understand that much,' Alsup said, asking him to move on. But he had to ask several questions to grasp some aspects of Java, including the concept of Java class libraries. 'Coming into today's hearing, I couldn't understand what was meant by a class,' he admitted."

Lawyers for Oracle and Google gave Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco an overview of Java and why it was invented, and an explanation of terms such as bytecode, compiler, class library and machine-readable code. The tutorial was to prepare him for a claim construction conference in two weeks, where he'll have to sort out disputes between the two sides about how language in Oracle's Java patents should be interpreted. At one point an attorney for Google, Scott Weingaertner, described how a typical computer is made up of applications, an OS and the hardware underneath. 'I understand that much,' Alsup said, asking him to move on. But he had to ask several questions to grasp some aspects of Java, including the concept of Java class libraries. 'Coming into today's hearing, I couldn't understand what was meant by a class,' he admitted."

Not only is it a good idea in general to know what you're talking about, I posit that it should be made illegal to preside over a case unless you understand the basics of what is disputed... As in cases such as this, a brief crash course can be given. A simple quiz about the subject could be given to judges and jurors alike to deem if they are fit to pass judgment.

Additionally, I think the patent system should also apply this methodology to their examiners. Clearly, the examiner that allowed the "swinging on swing sideways" patent application [google.com] to be granted in 2002 was not properly educated about the common use of swings in general... A bit of education in this respect could have saved lots of tax payer dollars spent on the re-examination and subsequent invalidation of the bogus "business method" patent.

Except that knowing something specific about, say, a murder case is not the same thing as knowing what the fuck murder is. What occurred here with the judge being briefed on some java terms seems to be the latter.

my main "activity"(aka applet/application/midlet) has imports like import android.util.Log; import android.app.Activity; etc,but here's the imports from the rendering class that actually does something else than just interface input and os things,

No no.. A guerrilla should never be weighed in pounds -- That's a currency unit you dolt. They can cost 800 pounds, but no gorilla or guerrilla is worth it's weight in pounds!

The real 800 pound gorilla in the room is that this saying depends on the current exchange rate for gorillas, eh? I can never figure out if that saying refers to an expensive, cheap, or reasonably priced ape. What's the going exchange rate for gorillas these days in Loonies? [wikipedia.org]

Computer Science and software engineering are rife with themes. Many so-called inventions and 'new' ideas are applying these tried and true themes to a new permutation of some old problem. For instance, folding two loops together to reap stale items in a hash-table while simultaneously doing a query by iterating across a bucket list (a previous but recent slashdot patent posting). You can tell someone (a Judge) what JIT is, that it effectively combines caching of already-compiled code with partial compilation, but he can't appreciate that software engineering and computer science are pervaded by the concepts of caching, and right-sizing work. He can't possibly appreciate how obvious some of these 'inventions' are, and rank them fairly on a scale of truly inventive (LZW in my opinion) to 'someone-skilled-in-the-art-could-do-that' (twiddling bits in FAT to support short file-names). I think this is in general the primary source of frustration for engineers and scientists: that judges and patent clerks who really have no good sense of taste or knowlege on the matter make such important decisions. Redhat pointed out once that in the _vast_ majority of patent suits, the person being sued is never accused of actually _reading_ the patent, but infringing accidentally. People don't read software patents, so their claimed benefit of being able to publish great ideas by protecting them for the inventor is just bunk: society eats the bar while the inventor is anomolously protected for really no reason. They are basically landmines that only rich or organized people can buy, and most of the community knows it. Giving judges crash courses in Java is a promising start, but its also a depressing reminder of how far we have to go.

> He can't possibly appreciate how obvious some of these> 'inventions' are,

That's where the adversarial system of plaintiff vs. defendant succeeds. Proviso, the litigant, combatants are equally resource rich, i.e., matched. No man, nor judge is omniscient, men are ignorant on all but their singular competency. Thou thinkest too much of modern informatik.